Now this, and I'll try to be quick if not short:
SanDiegoBuffGuy wrote:If you want to talk responsibility, talk to all of the people who drain the healthcare system by making poor lifestyle choices and making the decision to be unhealthy.
Yeah, yeah, we get it. You sprang whole from your own forehead, owe nothing to anyone, and are totally healthy, free and sovereign, forevermore.
If it were up to me, you should not pay a fine for not having health insurance. No, you should be charged in cash at the ambulance door, next time you need one.
Still, all your good diet and training at the gym and assertions of total individual independence don't entitle you to spread complete bullshit.
All of the modern health care systems that cover everyone in a country's population, without regard to "poor lifestyle choices," cost far less than the US health care sector as a percentage of GDP.
All of these have incomparably lower administrative costs as a share of overall costs.
Most of these provide better health care overall, if lifespans and childbirth deathrates and other macro indicators are considered. (If you control for per capita income, the US system probably comes out worse than all of them. But you're not obligated to do the last by anything other than good social science practice.)
Which is to say, all the real-world examples of "socialized medicine" (all of which use means to force everyone into the system) show it's better in health-care results and cheaper in cost just to cover everyone.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!" Who would have thought it?
Now what makes your statement complete bullshit is this. If anything is draining the system (other than the need of the insurance companies to assure they get a nice fat slice of the pie for themselves, and of some health providers to overcharge for their services), it is not those with "poor lifestyle choices." It's the healthy people who live into their 80s and 90s who end up making the most use of the system as a group, especially given that a good proportion of them do not conveniently drop dead at the end, but also require a years of intense care.
The worst lifestyle choice is probably smoking (I'm having one right now!) and that is covered by the exorbitant taxation on cigarettes.
Of course, keeping track of "poor lifestyle choices" (as vague a term as it gets) so that those who make them are forced to pay accordingly would involve a huge surveillance state, at an exorbitant cost. Once again, it's cheaper just to cover everyone.
And how would that be determined? Does bungee jumping count? Speeding? Having a car at all? Not going to bed by 10? How much wine is allowed? Canned goods? TV hours? Desserts?
I get it, you don't want that either.
The real upshot of your view is that there shouldn't be any system, just a market for individuals to purchase from providers, and caveat emptor. Really, you should be forced not to make any use of complex institutionalized services of any kind, since these always require some kind of base and infrastructures that ultimately the public pays for. That means someone somewhere is being charged for someone else without immediate benefit, which is just terrible. Therefore health care should be a market of individual doctors offering care to individual buyers. At least, that's the only way the libertarian logic could actually work in the real world.
But I don't mind. Next time you drop a barbell on your foot, go ahead and make use of the municipal emergency services. Assuming these are even funded any more in San Diego, I don't know.
Just don't give us the divide-and-conquer propaganda. Smokers and fatties are no more a "drain on the system" than the mythical welfare queen is on the social welfare state, or the underwater mortgage buyers who are now defaulting on crushing terms are the ones who caused the financial meltdown and the economic depression.
